Long Covid in the media and social media 2023

This was a very good interview with Hannah Davis and Dr. Bhupesh Prusty on Long Covid and ME. Available as audio and transcript.

Science Friday Here's What We Know About Long COVID Three Years Later

 

Their proposal for a national action plan has now been published in full (in Swedish) on their website:

https://covidforeningen.se/vart-arbete/nationell-handlingsplan-postcovid/

 

BBC News: Thousands of NHS staff with long Covid risk losing their pay

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-64405899

 

Thanks @Andy
It’s really sad how the NHS treats it’s workers when the work and it’s conditions makes them sick.

For the scale of the damage £314 isn’t enough to pay for the “right” treatment. But it’s far too much to pay for the wrong and damaging treatment, which this is.

“invested £314 million to establish specialist services throughout England”

 

I don't think that's true, they're probably counting money used for other purposes, but that's a shocking waste with nothing to show for it. They pinch every penny of research that would completely end this issue while trucking tons of money onto useless services that move nothing forward, in fact pretty much maximize the costs and harm. It's hard to provide worse management of any public funding.

But I guess we have our answer as to who those clinics are marketed to: the professionals. They seem to love doing nothing and wasting resources with nothing to show for it. Literally spending money 3x over and it's completely wasted: the direct costs of useless services, the opportunity cost of not doing research that will solve the issue entirely, while having to bear all the social and economic costs of negligence. And they're happy with it, no wonder it's all so broken and there is no difference between failure and success: they literally can't tell the difference either way, it's all bureaucratic checkboxes and mindless narratives.

 

Currently on BBC1( Monday 30th Jan at 8pm) N HS workers with long covid: its impact.

edit: for those NHS workers who caught covid at work, there was an extended period of full pay following illness, but it is shortly reducing to half pay.

 

A comprehensive and wide ranging overview of long covid with its links to ME/cfs. I have only scanned it quickly. There is in-depth discussion of ME/cfs.


https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9839201/

" Because ME/CFS and dysautonomia research is not widely known across the biomedical field, long COVID research should be led by experts from these areas to build on existing research and create new diagnostic and imaging tools."

Conclusions
Long COVID is a multisystemic illness encompassing ME/CFS, dysautonomia, impacts on multiple organ systems, and vascular and clotting abnormalities. It has already debilitated millions of individuals worldwide, and that number is continuing to grow. On the basis of more than 2 years of research on long COVID and decades of research on conditions such as ME/CFS, a significant proportion of individuals with long COVID may have lifelong disabilities if no action is taken. Diagnostic and treatment options are currently insufficient, and many clinical trials are urgently needed to rigorously test treatments that address hypothesized underlying biological mechanisms, including viral persistence, neuroinflammation, excessive blood clotting and autoimmunity.


Thread here:Long COVID: major findings, mechanisms and recommendations, 2023, Davis, Topol et al

 

An excellent article

 

From Australia.

Long COVID clinics and patients in limbo after federal funding expires, https://www.theage.com.au/national/...-federal-funding-expires-20230130-p5cgez.html
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Copied to the News from Australia thread

 

Covid was devastating – why are we pretending it didn’t happen?
Emma Beddington

A recent book about the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic details a ‘collective forgetting’ of the period. Our lack of Covid reckoning suggests history is repeating itself

My best friend has been ill and it’s taken both of us back to March 2020. For her, it’s reawakening the real trauma of getting very poorly and waiting, struggling to breathe, for an ambulance that never came. I was far luckier, but it’s revived memories of trying to keep in touch with her, waking each morning terrified she wouldn’t answer my messages, as our robustly fit and healthy neighbour died in hospital, his partner unable to visit.

Covid was so bad for so many – why aren’t we talking about it more? My friend, who suffers badly from long Covid, struggles to understand the refusal of many people to think or talk about the pandemic; their reluctance to understand what it has taken from her and from so many others. She’s baffled by the apparent desire to pretend it never happened, or that it wasn’t a big deal.

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...stating-why-are-we-pretending-it-didnt-happen

 

There is a very predictable pattern where any good news, however fake, about LC get massive coverage while everything else gets drowned out. A recent study, flawed of course, claims that a healthy lifestyle, eating well and exercisizing, "may" halve LC rates. But LC is completely diminished, it's almost only ever mentioned as "do this and you will avoid it".

Like clockwork, the flawed study is getting lots of headlines with a simple-but-wrong message about LC. Big headlines, from other news sources I follow. There is so much disinformation in health and medicine, no wonder things are so screwed up. I saw many today. Of course corrections to the invalid framing will not. The asymmetry of bullshit, turbocharged.

 

CNN Business: Is the Fed ignoring long Covid in its inflation fight?

Oops.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1620419714899148800
Gez Medinger - guest speaker at a LC and CFS (hmmh no ME/CFS) summit…read the info on people presenting and topics, (just to satisfy my curiosity that he would keep promoting himself)….one big smorgasbord of disinformation and misinformation. Roll on up….

edit to attach link I forgot….

 

(Paywall)
I tried the new test for long Covid

Francesca Steele suffered fatigue and flu symptoms for a year after she had coronavirus. Now she’s taken a new private blood test, what would her diagnosis be?
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...elldx-blood-treatment-symptoms-2023-hjz3rgdq0

Discussed more here:First test for long Covid gets EU approval, August 2022 - IncellDx incellKINE Long COVID test